OGG / Vorbis Metadata Viewer

Read the tags inside an OGG Vorbis file

An OGG metadata viewer shows the title, artist, album, date, and any custom tags embedded in an OGG Vorbis audio file, plus the encoder that produced it. It is handy for checking a music library, debugging a tagging script, or confirming what an encoder wrote — all without uploading the audio.

How it works

OGG is a container of pages. Each page begins with the four-byte capture pattern OggS, a 27-byte header, and a segment table whose byte values sum to the page’s payload length. The tool walks these pages and concatenates their payloads into the logical bitstream.

Within that stream it searches for the Vorbis comment header packet, identified by the byte 0x03 followed by the ASCII string vorbis. The header then follows the Vorbis I layout, all little-endian: a 32-bit vendor length and vendor string, a 32-bit comment count, and for each comment a 32-bit length followed by a KEY=VALUE UTF-8 string. Each string is split on the first = into a tag name and value.

Common Vorbis comment fields

Vorbis comments are free-form, but the community has converged on standard field names. These are the ones you are most likely to encounter:

Any key is technically valid — encoders can add proprietary fields — and all are displayed in the table.

What the vendor string tells you

The vendor string is written by the encoder before the comment list. It is not a tag you set; it is a self-identification string the Vorbis encoder library embeds automatically. Common values:

• Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20150105 — classic libVorbis release
• aoTuV b6.03 — the community-tuned AoTuV branch of libVorbis
• FMOD — games audio or middleware

The vendor string is useful for tracking down encoding-quality issues or understanding the provenance of files in a large library.

Why tags may not appear

• Untagged file. The file was encoded without any comments; only the vendor string will show.
• OGG Opus codec. Opus files use an OpusTags header with a different magic byte sequence (OpusTags), not the Vorbis comment header. This viewer targets Vorbis specifically.
• Truncated file. If the file is incomplete and the comment header page has not been downloaded or copied, no tags can be read.
• Non-Vorbis codec in OGG container. FLAC-in-OGG uses yet another packet structure, and Speex uses a Speex header.

Tips and notes

• Common keys are TITLE, ARTIST, ALBUM, DATE, GENRE, TRACKNUMBER, and ALBUMARTIST, but any custom key is valid and will be shown.
• OGG Opus files use a similar container but an OpusTags header rather than the Vorbis comment header, so this Vorbis-specific viewer may not find tags in them.
• The vendor string identifies the encoder (for example Xiph.Org libVorbis), which can help track down how a file was produced.
• Only the file’s header region is read, so even large tracks are parsed instantly without loading the whole file.
• Nothing is uploaded — parsing happens entirely in your browser using the DataView API.